James Richards’ “Fevers”

James Richards’ new film is an experiment in how meaning is produced in the space between things. The opening section of this thirty-minute video, screened in the bathhouse that Sylvia Kouvali has repurposed for a gallery, combines two canonical films that seem diametrically opposed in form and sensibility. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966) might be the purest expression of formalist filmmaking ever made, stripping the medium back to its most basic elements (a white screen, a black screen) and alternating them to produce hallucinatory optical effects. Richards superimposes onto his own animated remake of Conrad’s work the subtitles from Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains Negatives (Negative Hands, 1978), which is, by contrast, a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling.

Duras’s narrative reflects on the potential of pictures, specifically stencilled cave paintings, to join the person who made the images thirty thousand years ago to the person looking at them in the here and now. What bridges the gap is desire: “I will love anyone,” runs the libretto, “who hears me screaming ‘I love you.’” Thus one of the most physically demanding films ever made—about the hostile effects of which every visitor entering this gallery is warned—is combined with one of the most intimate and humane.

What connects these works is absence. As the intervals between Conrad’s frames invite (you might say force) the viewer to generate their own scintillant patterns out of the chaos, so Duras operates in the space separating language from image, body from representation, asking her audience to step out with her into that no-man’s land. Thus one impulse in the making of art (to move us out of ourselves) is revealed to be in dynamic relation with another (to bring us closer to others). Both entail a degree of risk. 

This dialectic tension isn’t resolved in Richards’ work, but rather expressed through the deployment of juxtaposition, rhythm, and meter. Overlaying Duras’s words onto Conrad’s images, for example, creates a disorienting push/pull: just as your eye is beginning to settle into the stroboscopic effects of the latter, it has to pull out to refocus on the affirmations of desire delivered by the former. Sensorially and intellectually, you are caught between these two horizons and asked to oscillate between them. It is unsettling, exhilarating.

And then the tempo shifts, and the video moves into a new chapter. Now the camera pans across a rock face into which rudimentary faces and figures appear to have been carved. The emotive soundtrack—an ethereal combination of field recordings with delicate flute, distorted song, and swooning strings—further encourages the interpretations that the mind is programmed (by inheritance and conditioning) to make.1 The spokes etched around the upper two of one triangle of holes imply eyes widened in surprise; that pattern of pockmarks suggests a screaming mouth; the horns on the top of that round face suggest a devil, a satyr, a cuckold. 

It is not clear whether we are looking at prehistoric graffiti or merely suggestive accidents of erosion. The suspicion that we might be making too much of random natural phenomena introduces the question that seems to drive this film: are the stories that we tell ourselves about the world mere illusion? Are we kidding ourselves? In an elegant accompanying text, Richards admits to having spent time in recent years questioning the value of making “poetic abstractions” during a period when “absolute events” ranging from genocide to ecological disaster are every second being “piped into our pockets.” Is any of this real, and does it matter?

A commissioned essay, written by Kristian Vistrup Madsen, describes Richards’ work as “defy[ing] interpretation.” This came as a surprise to me, for whom this video seems actively to demand, to be crying out for interpretations (perhaps the plural here is crucial). If the montage of expressionistic images that is its third and final section—swooping birds, glittering fires—does indeed resist a singular, easily legible meaning, then this seems designed to encourage the viewer to exercise their own interpretative faculties, to make imaginative associations between materials that are connected in Richards’ sophisticated edit by a profound sensitivity to the dynamics of music and moving images.

The artist describes the film as a “fever dream,” and like a dream it repurposes found images as vehicles to transport unconscious fears and desires into consciousness (“metaphor,” in Greek, means to “carry across”). A fever dream, what's more, is a physical as much as a psychological phenomenon, an illness that makes our waking life unusually vivid and in doing so unsettles it. If we are to understand the sickness of our irrational and self-destructive times, then, we must interpret the dreams it provokes. Fevers is the most moving, and perhaps the most significant, new work I have seen this year.